by Hari Kunzru
Was I back? Was it really me? I held her, smelling her familiar smell, barely daring to breathe.
It was only later, after Nina had gone to bed, that we managed to talk. We sat together in the kitchen, over the remains of a pasta dinner. Rei asked me for the third or fourth time how I was doing and immediately apologized, saying she knew it was an irritating question. I tried to take her hand across the table, awkwardly navigating the bowls and water glasses. She allowed her hand to be held, but it felt artificial, as if we were on an early date. After a minute or so, she withdrew it and started playing with her fork.
“Tell me honestly, are you angry with me for having you put in a psych ward?”
“No. God no.”
“I know how much you hate—authority and so on. But I wasn’t sure what else to do. You were in danger.”
“I understand.”
“Do you hate me?”
“No. Of course I don’t.”
“I just want you to be well again.”
“I’m going to be fine. I can feel it.”
There was something else she wanted to ask. I always know when Rei has a question, even when she’s trying to hide it. Her emotions are never very far from the surface, even if they’re almost always expressed in pauses and hesitations.
“Talk to me.”
“I’m not going to ask you—I mean, I know you’ll tell me eventually, when you’re ready. About what happened to you in Berlin. But…” She trailed away. “Oh God this is hard.”
“Go on.”
“I don’t want to be scared of you.”
“You don’t have to be.”
“I don’t want to be. I really don’t.”
“I know.”
“Can you do me a favor. Can you look at me?”
I’d been feigning interest in the table. I met her gaze as steadily as I could.
“Are you a danger to Nina and me?”
“No. I promise.”
“You won’t hurt her.”
“Never, I swear it.”
She nodded and got up from the table. For a while she busied herself in the kitchen, wiping the counter, putting things back in the fridge. I sat, frozen in place. For her to have to ask that. For me to have to answer. It was as if a hole had opened up inside me, a great pit of misery that had sucked in all my substance. I wanted to react, to have some kind of feeling beyond raw shock. At the edges of my vision, the world seemed approximate, pixelated. Rei didn’t make eye contact when she spoke.
“I’ve made you up a bed in the spare room.”
“OK.”
“I’m sorry. I’m having trouble sleeping. I need—I just need to sleep.”
There wasn’t really anything else to be said. We both got ready for bed, Rei waiting until I’d used the bathroom before she started her own routine. I shut the door of the spare room, a grand name for a narrow space just big enough for a daybed and a desk cluttered with my old papers. Since giving up my office, my usual habit had been to work in libraries and cafés, but after Nina’s birth I’d wanted to be close to home, and the money spent on coffee and pastries was no longer justifiable, so this had become my lair. It wasn’t pleasant to be shut in there with the detritus of my failed book project, the Post-its on the wall, the various journals and anthologies I’d been consulting before I went away. It was hard to think back to the person who wanted to write about lyric poetry. The very idea seemed like a provocation, a sick joke. I peeled off the Post-its, tidied the books and papers into piles and stacked them on the floor, carrying on until the surface of the desk was clear. It was a version of the routine I always fell into when I was starting work after a break. Tidying my desk put me in the right frame of mind to write, though in this case I was preparing to erase or forget my writing, or at least that particular period of it, to consign some part of my writing life to the past. I was boxing up the train of thought that had led to Berlin, to the lake and the Conference House, to Paris, the island. When I’d finished, I switched off the desk light and lay down in bed.
I was still awake after midnight. The apartment was silent. I was sure Rei was asleep, so I gave in to temptation and went to look in on Nina. All afternoon she’d more or less ignored me, keeping close to her mom, not allowing me to help her with her dinner or her bath or getting into her pajamas. When I tried to sit with her as she watched a TV show, she told me to leave. I want to do it on my own, she said. Of course she hadn’t wanted me to read her a story either, though I was desperate to snuggle up with her, to turn the pages and answer her questions and do the best voices for the characters I possibly could. I’d tried hard to persuade her, perhaps too hard, because Rei shot me a look. It was probably easier, she said, if she did it.
I padded barefoot down the corridor and cracked open her door. It was hard to see in the dark, and I stepped carefully inside. Her bed was empty. I experienced a moment of panic. She’d vanished. Someone had taken her. Trying to control my alarm I opened the door to our room. Yes, Nina was in bed with Rei, sprawled facedown, her arms out by her sides. I grinned with relief, but Rei must have heard the creak of the door, because she gasped and sat up in bed. I heard her fumbling with the lamp. Suddenly we were face-to-face. An orange cone of light, a dark background, blue-gray, paler in the places where the light from outside crept round the curtains.
“What the hell? What are you doing?”
“I’m sorry. I just—go back to sleep. I was worried. I didn’t know where Nina was.”
“You can’t—you can’t just come in here like this. You can’t.”
“I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean to wake you up.”
I closed the door.
The next day at breakfast, she cried.
“I’m sorry. I’m just not ready. I’m not sure if I can do this.”
Nina patted her hand. “There, there, mommy. It’s OK.”
Wracked with remorse, I promised I’d stay in my room. And if it became too stressful to have me in the house, I’d find somewhere else to sleep. I could call Femi. As I made the offer, I realized that he also had a child at home, so it wouldn’t work. Rei shook her head. We’ll be fine, she said. I wasn’t sure if that “we” included me. She dabbed at her eyes and looked at the time on her phone.
“What will you do today?”
“I don’t know. I might go to The Good Bean. Femi said they have a new menu.”
“That’s a nice idea. Go for a walk, get some air. I won’t be late tonight, but call me if you need anything. Just relax.”
Soon afterwards, Paulette arrived. She said hello to me and immediately started dressing Nina for the park. She clearly didn’t want to stay in the apartment with me for a minute longer than necessary. Rei came out in her work clothes and kissed me goodbye, her mouth dry against my cheek. She was wearing an unfamiliar perfume, and it tugged at something in my brain, some memory, so I held on to her for a moment, longer than was appropriate, trying to work out what it was, until she unpeeled herself from my embrace and began to gather her things. Nina and Paulette followed her out. The door clicked shut and for the first time since the island, I was alone, unobserved, free to do what I wanted. I had no idea how to deal with this freedom, and above all I wanted to be normal, to play some useful role, so I occupied myself by doing housework. I decided I’d make things as nice as possible for Rei when she came back home. When I’d done all I could, scrubbing the bathroom tiles with a toothbrush, chipping away with an old knife at the stubborn carbonized patches in the oven, I went to The Good Bean and ordered the triple-sprouted grain bowl, which I ate as slowly as I could, mindfully chewing each virtuous organic mouthful and watching the twenty-somethings at the tables around me working on their laptops.
Over the next two or three weeks we made small advances. I kept the apartment spotless and cooked elaborate meals. A minor side effect of my
medication was that I could barely taste food, but I was mainly interested in pleasing Rei, and took a maternal satisfaction whenever she cleaned her plate. Gradually Nina got used to my presence, incrementally letting her guard down. I was allowed to do small tasks for her; I helped her put on her shoes; I cut her toast into soldiers, buttered it to the edges in the approved manner and arranged it in a pattern on the plate. Good daddy. One evening she climbed onto my lap as I was reading a book, and to my alarm, tears began to run down my face. The reaction was instantaneous, like flipping a switch. I had to fumble in my pocket for a handkerchief.
Each night, Rei waited until I had finished in the bathroom, before taking her shower and brushing her teeth. I would go into my own room and close the door. Then I’d hear her slippered feet in the corridor outside. I slept badly, another side effect of my medication, but I never left the room. Since I found it hard to concentrate on reading, and I didn’t want to make Rei nervous by wandering around the apartment, I spent my insomniac hours in an activity that I would have sneered at just a few months previously, filling in elaborate mandala patterns in one of those “adult” coloring books that are marketed as tools for stress relief. It was a pointless task (in general I’ve never liked doing anything “just to pass the time”) and it made me feel like a prisoner whiling away his sentence doing weaving or scrimshaw, but I persisted. I was determined to get well, to be normal. Whatever it took to come back home.
Every so often, Rei and I tried to talk, with mixed results. I’ve always found it hard to speak on cue about my emotions. I am an articulate person, but only about things that don’t touch me. As soon as someone asks what I feel, I get confused. I don’t have the immediate access to my feelings that seems, to my eternal amazement, to be the birthright of most human beings. What question could be more profound than how are you? It feels lazy to say just any old thing, so I look inside myself and invariably this is a terrible idea. Searching for feelings is like being the lookout on a ship, shining a lantern into thick fog. Objects that appear close at hand recede into the murk, or reveal themselves as chimeras. Somewhere off the port bow are icebergs. At any rate, it takes me a great deal of time to formulate a response, and to the questioner it must seem as if I’ve been struck dumb. The worst version of this is when Rei asks me to articulate how I feel about her. I love you, I say, which is true, and ought surely to be enough. But she’s a lawyer, and she invariably follows it up with some version of the question why do you love me? and I feel like she’s taking a deposition; her tone suggests that we are conducting a grave and serious investigation, and suddenly it seems extremely urgent to tell the truth. Of course that’s perfectly reasonable—anything less, anything pat or cliché would be a betrayal, I’ve made vows, after all, before God or at least an official licensed by the city of New York—but my very lack of access to the answer, not having it immediately on hand, gives rise to the suspicion that I don’t know why I love her, or worse, lends the answer (when it belatedly comes) a suggestion of insincerity. Nothing I say is good enough. Something about my tone invariably scans as arch or qualified or mediated, even actively sarcastic. At the best of times, Rei finds me an unsatisfactory bestower of compliments, though I am a man in love, a man all in, his emotional chips stacked on a single number. This was a problem before my breakdown, and since I came home, the stakes have been infinitely higher.
What I told Rei about Berlin was, admittedly, only a fragment of the truth. She’d heard from the administrators at the Deuter Center that I’d been difficult and uncooperative. I’d had an abrasive relationship with some of the other fellows, and I’d made bizarre and unsubstantiated allegations about breaches of privacy. The final straw had been an encounter with the police, after I had tried, inexplicably, to gain access to a secure facility for refugees. I told her about how I’d seen the father and daughter, how they seemed to crystallize everything I’d been thinking about, all the great problems of the world, how in a confused way I’d wanted to do something for them, but in the moment it had been misunderstood. Rei told me that Dr. Weber had implied that I was trying to get access to the daughter. They suspected me of involvement in human trafficking. She hadn’t believed it, she said. Not for a moment.
It was particularly hard to talk about Anton, because nothing about that situation was any clearer to me than before. For obvious reasons, I hadn’t watched any more of Blue Lives, and since I was avoiding the internet, I had no idea what he’d been doing since I saw him in Paris. I suspected that he’d be involved in some way in the growing turmoil of the American election campaign, but I knew that if I went looking for information, I’d be dragged back into all the other questions, everything that, for the sake of my mental health, I needed to keep at a distance. I spoke to Rei about the island in the most general terms. I said I’d been convinced that I needed to confront something, some metaphysical danger, and that it had been tied up with the idea of North. I said I’d seen pictures of the cliffs, and it had seemed to me that if I went there, I’d achieve some kind of resolution. Rei asked me what I meant by “the idea of North.” It was an odd phrase. I said, truthfully, that it had made more sense at the time. Whiteness. A kind of white mysticism. I was afraid that if I said more it would spook her, that the extremity of my experiences would lead her to conclude that I was beyond hope of redemption and she would be better off severing ties, taking Nina elsewhere and making a life which didn’t include me and my scarred brain.
Rei tried her best to be reasonable, to give me the benefit of the doubt, but she found it hard. One evening, after a long day at work and a particularly fractious bath-and-bedtime, I said something about existential risk and she lost her temper. I always had been selfish, she told me. It was always my sensitivity, my woundedness. I acted like I was so special, the only sensitive person in the world. In truth, I didn’t actually think twice about the people close to me. My pain was grand and romantic, but she was the one who was left to clean up my mess. And what about Nina? What effect would all this have on her? Even now I was clinging to some story about the world ending. The harsh reality was that I hadn’t been able to handle everyday life so I ran away. That was all. I had run away and left my family.
It was a terrible conversation. She asked me outright if I’d been planning to kill myself. That’s the only thing she had really heard in all my convoluted explanations. I’d disappeared to an island and I’d been going to kill myself rather than stay with her and Nina. As far as she was concerned, all the rest was just noise.
Of course, even when we talked and didn’t reach this pitch of confrontation, Rei could tell that I was hiding things. There were secrets that I wasn’t ready to share. Hannah Arendt says something about how a life spent in public becomes shallow, how it loses the quality of rising into sight from some unseen darkness or depth. Privacy is not an unreasonable expectation, but my privacy was a threat to Rei. What was I hiding in my black box? What violence, what delusions? So she picked away at it, trying in her lawyerly fashion to breach my defenses, to do what she felt she had to do to protect herself and her daughter. I understood. There were times when she wore me down so much that if I could have turned myself inside out to reassure her, I would have. I would have shown her everything, all the ugliness, if I’d only had a clue how to go about it. I did want to show myself to Rei, to her above all people.
I believe everyone has a place, a mental laboratory where we experiment with thoughts that are too strange or fragile to expose. I believe that we need to preserve it, in order to feel human. It is shrinking, its scope reduced by technologies of prediction and control, by social media’s sinister injunction to share. The paranoid belief that took hold of me in the clinic—that chips under my skin were sending data to my enemies—while literally untrue, was an exaggerated form of this recognition. It was the place where I retreated in those late night hours I spent coloring in mandalas with orange and teal, the contrasting shades that I had begun to notice all arou
nd me, a current trend in Hollywood film grading that I saw everywhere in a visual environment that ought to have felt unmediated, ought to have felt real.
Since I needed an activity, I decided to repaint the living room. It was time-consuming and disruptive, a perfect channel for my nervous energy. I did everything meticulously, moving the furniture into the center of the room and covering it with plastic, masking the woodwork, washing the walls, filling and sanding cracks, trying to create the smoothest surface possible. I consulted Rei about colors. Nina offered her impractical opinions (purple daddy, paint it purple) and the three of us made a happy Saturday outing to the hardware store, choosing the paint and watching the guy mix it in one of those loud mechanical oscillators. When the room was done, it looked good, fresh and hopeful, the subtle greenish-gray tint a huge improvement on the dirty magnolia that had been there before.